


you know I believe and how

by bookishandbossy



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Happy Ending, Light Angst, Romance, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 13:13:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9730886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: Jyn Erso spends twenty-one years of her life without a trace of anyone else on her skin.  The day after the Rebellion rescues her from the prison, one word appears scrawled across her collarbone.  In elegant black script, it readsHope.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MusicWritesMyLife](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MusicWritesMyLife/gifts).



> Written for the Rebelcaptain Network's Secret Valentine over on Tumblr. Title from "Something" by the Beatles.

Jyn Erso has more scars than she'd like to count. Round red circles, shiny with scar tissue now, from blaster hits. Thin white lines from plants and claws that scratched a little too deep. One dark gash that happened shortly after she started her time in the prison. But she's never had anyone else's words on her skin.

The words aren't a magic formula. They won't fix anything on their own or bind two people irretrievably together. Her parents had each other's words etched across their skin, two halves of the same sentence, and her mother fell to blaster fire on Lah'mu anyway. She wouldn't know what to do with them if they appeared anyway, she tells herself. Jyn is likely to spend the rest of her life in an Imperial prison. However little life she has left.

She has been a solitary creature since the age of sixteen, when Saw abandoned her. Imagining that there's someone else out there in the galaxy for her is...foolish. Impossible. She is singular, utterly her own ever since the little girl she once was went down into the darkness and someone different came out. No one could complete her. No one, Jyn suspects in her darker moments, would want to. 

 

Jyn Erso spends twenty-one years of her life without a trace of anyone else on her skin. The day after the Rebellion rescues her from the prison, one word appears scrawled across her collarbone. In elegant black script, it reads _Hope_. She isn't sure whether to laugh or cry at it. 

When she first meets Captain Cassian Andor, her skin _itches_. It's like something's crawled underneath her skin and gone surging through her veins, sinking down to settle deep in her bones, and she can't seem to settle herself around him. Her eyes follow his every step and she tells herself that it's because she doesn't trust him. (Not because something about her wants to drink him in, to know him. All she needs to know is that he's with the Rebellion and there's something he's not telling her about his orders.)

“Do you believe in the Force?” she asks him just before they land on Jedha. “Something flowing through each and every one of us?” 

“I believe in the people who believe in it,” he says. “More than I used to.”

He rubs absently at his wrist and she wonders if words burned their way onto his skin too. She nearly opens her mouth to ask if she can see them. Not that she wants to. It's only that she can't imagine Cassian lacking anyone. (Or letting himself lack them.) He has a smile and a quick word for everyone on the base, but the whispers she's gathered say that he spends most of his time alone and under someone else's name, jumping from planet to planet before the Empire can catch up to him. She wonders how many aliases he's had, how many different lives he's pulled out of thin air, and what happened to all the women she's left behind her burning up in her wake, the ones whose lives were never full enough to stand up to extended scrutiny. 

“The Captain's conviction levels have risen approximately two percent since we embarked on this mission,” K2 announces. “It's quite puzzling, especially since I have estimated our chances of failure at sixty-five percent and steadily climbing.”

Jyn rolls her eyes towards the ceiling and Cassian grins, just a little. 

 

On Jedha, pressed up against a wall and praying that no one finds them, her shoulder brushes up against his. A searing warmth streaks across her chest and curls up to her collarbone. Later, experimentally, she brushes against him as she leans over him in the cockpit to see if it happens again. That time, he shivers too, one hand going to his wrist almost involuntarily.

She wants answers. So she goes to Chirrut. The former temple guardian has a phrase stamped on his left forearm: “I am one with the force”. Its other half is on Baze's right forearm: “The force is with me”. If anyone understands what the universe is doing to her, it'll be him. 

“My words keep on burning,” she tells him flatly as she drops down into the cargo bay. “I think something's wrong.”

“Are you in pain?” Chirrut asks, turning towards the sound of her voice.

“Not exactly,” she admits. Burning isn't the right word for it. Because she's been caught by fire before, the proof of it in the thick scar that wraps around her knee, and she still remembers the way that her skin felt like it was about to be pulled off her bones. The feeling that sparks through her whenever she comes close to Cassian Andor is something entirely opposite. Pleasurable, she'd say if her tongue was brave enough to wrap around the word. It leaves her aware of the inch of skin where she's touching him and everywhere that she isn't, tugging her forward with the promise of more and warmth coiled low in her stomach. 

But it's not just the series of chemical reactions that make up lust. It's sunlight and ocean air and if Jyn would let herself, she would crave it with a hunger deeper than anything she's known before.

“Your words want to find the other half of their sentence,” Chirrut finally says. “When I began training as a temple guardian, my arm wouldn't stop tingling for days. Then I looked across the training yard and saw Baze.”

“He could've just asked, you know,” Baze grumbles. “There were only twenty or so of us at the temple. Instead he waited until the Force practically dumped me at his feet.”

“Literally,” Chirrut says smugly. “I saw his words when I bested him in a practice bout.”

 

She could be wrong. She could have mistaken the relief of finding someone who looks at her with respect in his eyes and fire in his words for something set in stardust. Her words could not be a person at all. Jyn's heard of it before. 

But when he tells her “welcome home”, she nearly takes his hand and asks to see his wrist for herself. She's not sure if she believes in home but if she did, she thinks that it would look like the spark of light in Cassian's eyes. Home might be the rumble of Baze's laugh too and Chirrut's easy grace as he takes down a dozen troopers with his staff and Bodhi's grin when the controls of the ship respond to his every move and even the sound of K2's dry voice calculating the odds. If she had the time, home might be the energy that crackles through the halls of the Resistance base and the shape an X-wing makes when it soars across the sky and the promise of something sweet and unfamiliar uncurling in her veins after years of bitterness froze them in place.

“How do you think they'll remember us?” she asks Cassian in the cockpit on the way to Scarif, curled up in the co-pilot's chair like the little girl she never was. 

“So you're saying you want something named after you? With lasers?” Cassian has a dimple tucked deep into his cheek when he smiles and she wants to capture it for her own.

“I wouldn't mind. But I--” Jyn pauses and tries to focus on the gauges in front of her instead of the shape of his mouth. It's a hopeless endeavor. “Are we just the prologue to something else? Something so much bigger that it'll eclipse everything else?”

“We've been part of something bigger since we joined the Rebellion. I don't really remember what life was like outside it,” he admits, his fingers curling around the edges of his seat. “But that doesn't mean—you could never be someone else's prologue, Jyn. They'll remember you.”

She's spent so much of her life trying to fade into the shadows, to make people forget that they've even seen her. But now, rapidly speeding towards a mission she may not return from, she finds that she would very much like to be remembered. And if anyone's going to remember her, she thinks that she'd like it to be Cassian. 

 

But there is a light in the sky that looks all too familiar as they stumble out onto the beach on Scarif and a roaring in her ears and she—she's opening her mouth to ask him what's written on his skin, because surely she has a right to that, here at the end of everything, and grabbing his hand to hold on tight. And a ship comes skidding down out of the sky, with a familiar figure at the controls. 

“Get in!” Bodhi shouts. They do, pulling each other up into the ship, her arm tight around his shoulders. Cassian collapses on the floor of the cargo bay and they hit hyperspace so fast that the force of their jump is ringing in her ears. Every last bone in her body aches and she's not sure if the smears of blood on her fingers belong to her or to him 

The Rebellion seems surprised to see them come back from Scarif. Jyn is too. And she doesn't quite know what to do with that. She didn't quite expect to die, when they left to steal the plans. But she didn't quite expect to live either. Jyn understands the way that stories work and there are very few ways that stories like hers end. But this...It feels as if the galaxy has decided to flip itself back to front and offer up something new to her. She doesn't have the first idea how to take it.

“I think I might want to learn how to fly a ship,” she tells Cassian while they're in the infirmary. (She protested until the med droids moved their beds next to each other. Loudly protested.)

“Well, I want to be there to see you crash it,” he murmurs.

“That's why Bodhi's going to be there,” she informs him sleepily. “In case I start to crash it.”

“Hasn't Bodhi been through enough already?”

She swipes a hand halfheartedly in his direction—all her limbs feel heavy, still drugged up on meds—and he catches it in his instead, linking their fingers together. Warmth spreads throughout her entire body and she inches closer until they're both on the edges of their cots, as close as they can possibly get without falling off. 

They fall asleep with their hands still intertwined. It's the closest Jyn has been to someone else in years. 

 

She starts sleeping in his room a few days after they get out of the infirmary. Just sleeping. She can feel the steadiness of his breathing against her side and sleep smooths the edges out of Cassian's face in a way nothing else does. Some days, when she wakes up before him, she'll watch his face in the morning light until she has it memorized. He's been giving her bits and pieces of him--over mugs of caf in the morning and walking alongside her as they go to briefing after briefing, sparring in the practice room—and she takes each one of them greedily. Because in the end it doesn't matter if his touch sends head-spinning sensations through her because the words on his wrist line up with hers or just because it's him. She wants him either way. Any way.

 

The first time Jyn kisses him, it is entirely unplanned and unpracticed. They're standing in the doorway of his bunk talking through the logistics of next week's mission and the corner of his mouth quirks up just a little when she teases him about enabling Bodhi's fondness for code names. And she kisses him. It's just a quick brush of lips at first, her mouth clumsy on his and her hands hanging awkwardly at her sides. Then he sighs against her mouth and her hands go up to hang on to the collar of his jacket and she's melting into him. 

He's cupping her face in both his hands like she's made out of glass, one hand curving back to pull her hair out of its neat bun—and his sleeve slips up an inch. And Jyn sees. _Rebellions are built on_ in neat print. A sentence waiting for its other half. 

“They're—they're just words,” he says unsteadily. “I'm not even sure what they mean.”

She doesn't say anything in response. Instead, she undoes the first three buttons and pulls her shirt to the side so he can see what's inked on her collarbone. Cassian looks like he's having trouble breathing. 

“I don't know if it matters what they say,” she tells him and takes both his hands in hers. “But I wanted you to know anyway.”

Cassian just kisses her again in response. They stumble through his doorway until his knees hit the back of his bunk and he falls backwards with a little gasp of breath, still grinning impossibly at her.

“I thought you were graceful,” Jyn teases and edges her way forward to stand between his knees. She can't seem to stop touching him now that she's started

“I'll show you graceful.” Then he's pulling her forward and they both go tumbling back and it's hands and mouths and breath and she's done this before but never quite like this, never hanging on to someone else with everything she has and—oh. Oh. 

Jyn Erso doesn't believe in much but she thinks she might be able to believe in them. 

 

“How do you think they'll remember us?” Jyn asks him. They're hopelessly tangled up together in his narrow bed, her head propped on his chest as he traces the word on her collarbone over and over again.

“As people who were happy, I think,” Cassian says softly. “I hope.”

She hopes too.


End file.
